~ After 50 years, clearly gaming is lifelong

Scatteration

Tlaloc is now a level 61 provisioner. Going after a level a day by running writs inside the guild hall; one level helps keep me from getting bored. I did not realize how crazy much experience you get from completing the tradeskill writs. He’s doing two writs, which is netting around 85-90% experience. I set the tradeskill bot guys in motion and dump whatever they have in the harvest depot. As an added bonus, my boy loves to watch me tradeskill, and blab on and on about how the game works, and relate it in terms he understands (think iTouch games).

Tezcatlipocca dinged 83, after leaving the Moors of Ykesha I looked through my questbook to see where the most quests remaining are concentrated. Fens of Nathsar was pretty high on the list, so I went over and experienced the nostalgia of seeing a place I hadn’t looked at for years. Ran through a few quests which needed doing, including a crawl through the Crystals and those big Crystal Tenders. It took forever to run my way through since I didn’t want to use invisibility totems; each update the invis would have worn off, and that would just be wasteful (12 updates). The fights weren’t hard at all as they were 74 green solos; I even pulled up to 5 and dispatched them with little problem.

And then – the lure of Star Trek pulled me back in.

Free has its allure

I rentered my old account and discovered I had two characters created. I was treated to an absolute blizzard of messages about fleet officers, achievements, and all kinds of auto-update kind of stuff. All skills were reset, and I had no clue where to start. I randomly picked a fight with an existing character and got my ship blown up. After that, I decided I needed to start over again and relearn the game.

Free to play appears limited to 3 characters. Well, that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m not sure why you’d want more than an engineer, tactical, and science officer. I deleted one of my old characters and kept Kelly the engineer, who was level 13. I then created Hammer the tactical officer and played through the tutorial. Not sure how to move monies between characters, it is supposedly possible to send items through the ingame mail. I couldn’t figure out how to do it, which leads me to believe it’s not allowed for free to play players.

The graphics in this game are awesome and the atmosphere sets up perfectly. Blasting the borg and moving your ship around are a snap. The tutorial took a long time to run through and I was left with the impression of Champions Online with a space skin. Next it should be time to go out and adventure; not to any particular end it seems, I think I’ll just let the quests lead me by the nose for now.

Talk about getting scattered. I want to progress in three different games now; two are simple grinds (EQ2 and WOT), and one is simply fun (Star Trek).